1000 artworks to see before you die: Artists beginning with A | Art and design | The Guardian
30.10.2008 11:01
Artists beginning with A
From Albrecht Altdorfer to Eugène Atget
Jonathan Jones, Robert Clark, Charlotte Higgins, Jessica Lack, Mark
Brown, Alfred Hickling, Maev Kennedy, Elisabeth Mahoney
The Guardian, Saturday October 25 2008
Winter by Arcimboldo. Photograph: Corbis
African masks - read more here
Albrecht Altdorfer - The Battle of Issus (1529)
Armies clash like a crowd of gold and red ants between sapphire sea and vertigoinducing sky in this apocalyptic masterpiece. Transposing the mayhem of Reformation
Germany onto Alexander the Great's ancient battle with Darius III, it is a timeless
hallucination of war's shining nightmare. Jonathan Jones
Ancient Americas - read more here
Carl Andre - Equivalent VIII (1966)
The Tate's decision to buy Carl Andre's rectangular arrangement of pale firebricks
stacked, uncemented, in two neat layers provoked one of
Britain's most notorious art controversies back in 1972. But it's a work of simple plain
beauty, finding proportion and geometry in the humblest things. (JJ)
Fra Angelico - San Marco frescoes (1438-1445)
The plain white vaulted cells of Dominican monks are reflected in haunting views
painted by the holiest Renaissance master. Spartan religious stories compel meditation.
An Annunciation scene shows atop a staircase like a monk's vision. (JJ)
Sofonisba Anguissola - Portrait of the Artist's Three Sisters with Their Governess
(1555)
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1000 artworks to see before you die: Artists beginning with A | Art and design | The Guardian
30.10.2008 11:01
Three young women are playing chess in a garden — the eldest looking out as she
moves a piece, while her youngest sister laughs as the middle sister prepares to
checkmate. This funny everyday scene is a rare painting by a Renaissance woman. (JJ)
Antonello da Messina - Virgin Annunciate (c1465)
A young woman in a blue veil looks up from her book at something we can't see; she
puts out her right hand gently, as if catching the invisible breath of the Holy Spirit.
Antonello is said to have made a perilous journey from southern Italy to Bruges
tolearn from Flemish painters; here he applies their new styles of portraiture to a
religious work to create an Annunciation focused entirely on Mary's face and gesture —
a beautiful, daring masterpiece. (JJ)
Nobuyoshi Araki - Sentimental Journey (1971)
Dirty old voyeur or one of the most prolific and aesthetically commanding photoartists in the world? Araki shifts, in a blink of his camera lens, from tied-up nudes to
close-up bouquets, from the baroque neon glow of Tokyo nightlife to picnics of
blossom-watching. Sentimental Journey is a heartbreaking series of typically revealing
images of his dying
wife's final days. Robert Clark
Diane Arbus - Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, NYC (1962)
Diane Arbus brought new subjects into view: those on the margins, the misfits, the
geeks and, as she called them, the freaks. In her influential redefinition of
photography's boundaries, the images are devoid of empathy but full of uncomfortable
intrigue. A gawky boy plays with a toy grenade, and the result is explosively unsettling.
Elisabeth Mahoney
Arcimboldo - Winter (1573)
The deep knot in a gnarled tree stump becomes a dark eye; two pale fungi form lips;
green ivy reveals signs of life in a hairy tangle of dry grey branches. This Habsburg
court artist's genius for finding faces in the natural world fascinated the surrealists.
(JJ)
Armenian (c915-921) - Reliefs on facade of Church of the Holy Cross
King Gagik, a 10th century Armenian ruler, is portrayed in robes decorated with
curling arabesques among holy personages, animals and a banquet. The timeworn
reliefs on this church in Turkey bear witness to a lost population. (JJ)
Hans Arp - Horloge (1924)
The roly-poly painted wooden blobs of Arp's art prove that abstraction does not have
to be serious. His playful works are at once reliefs, assemblages and paintings, with a
delight in chance and a pleasure in the visual that make them joyous and liberating.
(JJ)
Antonin Artaud - Self-Portrait (1946), Portrait of Jany de Ruy (1947)
Better known for his Theatre of Cruelty manifestos and a lifetime's poetic railing
against the evil spirits of mediocrity, Artaud, at the very end of his life, created some of
the most incisive portrait drawings of the 20th century. Ravaged by years of
electroshock, Artaud's once so beautiful face emerges in his Self-Portrait from a
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1000 artworks to see before you die: Artists beginning with A | Art and design | The Guardian
30.10.2008 11:01
electroshock, Artaud's once so beautiful face emerges in his Self-Portrait from a
tremulous web of insectile scratchings. In pained states of rage and elation, he pictures
his supportive friends as fellow victims of the insensate mob. Artaud really believed
that drawing was a ritual of self-creative and self-protective magic, and it shows. (RC)
Kutlug Ataman - Küba (2005)
Viewers are confronted by a cacophony of voices, as 40 residents of a shanty town in
Istanbul recount their life stories on TV monitors. Kutlug Ataman's provocative
installation reveals the humanity in a hidden and abused society. Jessica Lack
Eugène Atget - Maison de la Matrîse de Saint-Eustache (1902)
Atget's is the photography of the flâneur. Wandering about the dilapidated backstreets
of fin de siècle Paris, he came across the most exquisite atmospheric loveliness in the
form of the crumbling plaster walls of rag-and-bone yards and open air urinals. It's a
textured world, full of shabby charms and enticing shadows. (RC)
Aztecs and Incas - read more here
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